Wednesday, June 28, 2017

In this post I agreed with Grant Morrison that the majority of villains in the Silver Age FLASH were personifications of natural forces. However, one character, the futuristic magician Abra Kadabra, embodied not cosmological factors but those related to psychology and sociology.

The villain was one of the more unusual figures to spring from the Broome-Infantino collaboration, in that he was not oriented on crime for the sake of profit or even to thumb his nose at the law. Abra, a citizen born in the 64th century, conceived a passion for the long-dead art of stage magic. Since none of his people shared his passion, Abra travelled back to the 20th century, and began performing for the public in Central City, home town of the Flash. However, the magician proved such an attention-hog that he used his future-science to manipulate his audiences. The Flash overtook Abra and sent him to prison.

Abra didn't get a cover when he debuted in issue #128, but he does for his second appearance, and it's become an iconic example of DC's penchant for "weird transformation" illustrations. As the story commences, Abra is able to use his super-science to manipulate the governor of the state, who promptly pardons the magician even though he's only been in prison a few months.

Once he's been pardoned, Abra thinks to himself that he plans to go straight, since as before his main desire is to receive adulation from an audience.

However, since a completely reformed villain would make for a dull story, Abra can't quite resist coming up with an act designed to humiliate the superhero who imprisoned him. He puts on a puppet show for the denizens of Central City, and his main act consists of seeing a puppet of the Flash subjected to slapstick indignities by another puppet, "Captain Creampuff."

Even before seeing the puppet show, policeman Barry Allen (aka the Flash) already suspects that the magician secured his early release through chicanery. Most of the audience laughs at the puppet-antics, but not Barry, who rationalizes that the square citizens are merely chortling at the puppet-scenario because it's so rare for them to see the Flash lose a fight. Barry is also frustrated because he knows that Abra's mockery is entirely legal. "Yet I must prevent [Abra] from turning the Flash into a laughing-stock," Barry soliloquizes, "or the power of Flash against crime will be seriously weakened."

Therefore, rather than simply waiting for the audience to lose interest in Abra's act, the Flash turns proactive and steps up his war against crime. He's so successful at displaying his heroic prowess-- showing that he's no creampuff, in other words-- that people stop coming to the shows.

Abra can't stand being ignored and resorts to a direct attack on the superhero, using his future-magic to turn Flash into a real puppet, but leaving him his consciousness so that Flash must endure the abuse of his pie-tossing puppet adversary.

Flash gets out of it by resorting to the usual pseudo-science. At story's end, Broome seems to realize that it might be a little difficult to try a villain for turning a hero into a puppet. Thus there's a quick rationalization that somehow the police will manage to make Abra confess to having brainwashed the governor, which is a pretty weak resolution even for a 1960s comic book.

What isn't weak, though, is that the story examines the "war of wills" between hero and villain, showing how much of it depends upon the acclaim of the public. I'm not claiming that this realization is some sort of "deconstruction" of the superhero genre, as lazy elitists might assert. Rather, it's merely an attempt to ground the Flash's wild antics with a little psychological analysis. It's also interesting that even though Broome appears to be something of a conservative according to certain stories in his oeuvre, he's set up his story so that the villain is the more appealing figure. Abra's modus operandi is also much like the occupation of a real writer or artist; i.e., someone who depends on audience reception to earn his daily bread. And in contrast to his first story, Abra does manage to impress his audience by a legitimate appeal to their tastes. This puts the Flash in a position akin to the guardians of Plato's Republic: stomping out an artistic performance that threatens the commonweal. Which, now that I think of it, does carry a rather conservative vibe.

Saturday, June 24, 2017

In the same year that Neil Gaiman began his long run on THE SANDMAN title, he also did a couple of (apparent) tryouts for the SWAMP THING title: scripts that appeared in SWAMP THING ANNUAL #5, reviewed here. One of Gaiman's stories, which revived DC's "Brother Power" character, posited a world of "doll elementals" as the reason for Power's existence, in line with the plant elementals Alan Moore had introduced as a rationale for Swamp Thing's existence.

Over the next two years the SANDMAN title showed Gaiman stretching his creative muscles, as he varied between "short dreams" (essentially stand-alone stories, often featuring Morpheus of the Dreaming as the "host") and "long dreams" (longer, more involved story-arcs, some of which did not bear fruit until the end of the series). The first long arc, "The Doll's House," also invoked the image of dolls, but, like the famous Ibsen play, with a somewhat negative connotation, in which dolls were seen not as magical non-living presences-- as in the Brother Power story-- but as metaphors for being helplessly controlled by another's will.

As rendered by then-current Mike Dringenberg, the world of the Dreaming was taking on increasingly more complex, almost Jungian connotations, and this in part accounts for readers' enthusiastic reception of a world where dreams were real. "Doll's House" is perhaps not the best exemplar of this unique perspective. Though it's a long arc, parts of it are still more like short stories than anything, particularly "Men of Good Fortune," which has nothing to do with the plot of the arc, though it has a loose thematic relationship to the rest of the story.

At this point in the series Morpheus, having been released from magical captivity, is dealing with various problems in the dream-world he rules. Four entities, his "creations," have escaped the Dreaming, and there's an additional threat in the appearance of a "vortex," a rare phenomenon in which a mortal manifests the ability to wreak havoc on the dream-world. Morpheus must corral his errant creations and terminate the threat to his kingdom.

I said that Gaiman's conception was "almost" Jungian, because at this point Gaiman is still strongly oriented upon the Alan Moore model. In his early works for DC Comics, Moore helped pave the way for 'adult comic books" within the context of genre-productions, and one of his main strategies was to take an ironic or reductive view of key genre-fantasies. I won't attempt to recount the fine details of Gaiman's arc, particularly since they don't dovetail particularly well, but almost all of them relate to the ides of exposing some personal or cultural fantasy as deeply flawed or misunderstood. Taking them on an issue-by-issue basis:

#10-11 -- this issue introduces Rose Walker, the mortal vortex, who will in time learn that her everyday waking existence is actually a threat to the world of dreams.

#12-- Superhero Hector Hall, who took upon himself the identity of "the Sandman" within the pages of another DC comic, is exposed as nothing but a ghost with delusions of grandeur, manipulated by two of the nightmare-creations that escaped Morpheus' realm. The issue not only undermines the original Simon-Kirby conception of a "dreamworld superhero," from which Gaiman's Sandman was very loosely derived, it also features a few sequences in which a young boy experiences fanciful dreams evocative of Windsor McCay's "Little Nemo," but wakes up to ugly realities (a rat biting his face, for example),

#13-- the "Good Fortune" issue, in which Morpheus allows a mortal man to enjoy virtual immortality. During Morpheus' visit to Elizabethan England, it is revealed that a certain Bard owes his talent to having made a Faustian bargain with none other than the King of Dreams.

#14-- Morpheus tracks down one of his nightmare-creations, the Corinthian, to a very special convention, in which seasoned serial killers come together to discuss their avocation. In addition to destroying his creation, Morpheus forces all of the mortal killers to see themselves without the benefit of self-delusion. To some extent comic-book conventions and their attendees are the butt of the issue's satirical jokes, though it's reasonably clear that Gaiman isn't drawing a one-on-one comparison of comics-fans and serial killers.

#15-16-- Morpheus finds that the last of his errant creations, an entire dream-realm known as Fiddlers' Green, has taken mortal form and come into contact with Rose Walker. Though Morpheus' initial contact with Rose saves her from one of the serial killers, he then tells her-- within one of her dreams-- about her true nature, and that he must kill her to prevent her from destroying his world. He almost does so, but learns, through a very involved plot-line I won't recapitulate, that one of his supernatural siblings has been manipulating him to commit that transgression in order to destroy him Although Rose survives, she lives on with the feeling that all of humanity are merely "dolls" to greater, merciless forces, echoing Shakespeare's theme in KING LEAR: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport,." However, in his confrontation with his plotting sibling, Morpheus reveals a new wrinkle: that he and all of his metaphysical kindred are also merely "dolls," for they are brought into being by the passions and aspirations of mortal beings. At the end the sibling in question refuses to acknowledge the truth revealed by Morpheus, and the story ends with her thinking that she's "nothing like a doll at all."

It's a promising theme, that of the interdependence of mortals and their archetypal creations, but "Doll's House" doesn't live up to its potential. It's obviously an amalgam of separate story-ideas that Gaiman sought, only with partial success, to meld into a unified structure. Nevertheless, even if this early Gaiman work goes a little overboard with all of the "beautiful dreams hide nasty realities" schtick, there's still enough attention to the symbolic resonance of the dream-world that it isn't totally reductive in nature. One example is "Fiddler's Green," who is apparently the incarnation of an Earthly Paradise, without any attempt to reduce him to something else. Rose Walker is a little on the dull side, as if Gaiman wanted to make her as simple as possible for contrast's sake, but I found this simply made it harder to invest much conviction in her character.

It's a flawed story, but not so over-intellectualized as to fall into the category of the "null-myth," and it does prove to be of major importance in elucidating Gaiman's not-quite-Jungian concept of a universe of dreams.

Friday, June 16, 2017

I won't assert what many fans of "1966 BATMAN" have asserted: that Adam West-- who passed on June 9, 2017-- was the Only Real Batman. Over the years I've enjoyed the show and West's performance in it. Indeed, I shudder to think how the show would have been sunk had the producers decided to cast Lyle Waggoner in the role. But yeah, I could always imagine a Batman who was more true to the comics. Strangely, at some point-- possibly in his biography?-- West made the claim that the show did reflect what was going on in the BATMAN comic. Assuming he actually looked at some comic book before making that statement, what might he have seen that might've given him that impression? Some issue from the "Bat-Mite" period, perhaps?\

But that's merely speculation. Twice I saw Adam West, strictly from the POV of a fan attending a convention. The first time I went before him and got his autograph-- for a friend, since I don't collect autographs-- I found him a personable guy. I think I asked him something about his failed TV pilot LOOKWELL, but I don't remember what he said any more than I recall my question.

The second convention-encounter makes a slightly better story. West was taking questions from the floor and I was one of many in the audience. It seemed to me that the questions were either slow in coming or rather mediocre-- maybe both-- so I came up with one. Since I have a mild interest in how actors block out action for the camera, with or without the use of stuntpeople, I asked something about a scene from "The Bat's Kow Tow." At the end of the episode, Batman pursues Catwoman (played by the pneumatic Julie Newmar). Somehow she eludes him long enough to get up on a building-ledge one story up from the alleyway where Batman's running around looking for her. The camera cuts to make it look like she leaps down from the building, lands on Batman's back and knocks him to the ground, after which they play out the remainder of the scene.

So I asked about how the stunt was done, making the caveat that I was pretty sure Julie Newmar had probably just jumped off a ladder or something. I didn't think it was too likely Newmar would have had a body double for such a scene-- her body was pretty hard to double!-- but I thought West might have some little story about how the scene was done, even if he had to admit that some stuntman had taken the fall, not him.

While a straight answer might have been mildly entertaining, West then showed his ability to think on his feet and get a much bigger laugh out of the audience. Knowing that pretty much any straight guy in the audience would have loved to have had any physical contact with Newmar-- even that of having her fall on top of him-- West merely pointed over his shoulder, at his own back, and said simply, "See my back? SHE'S STILL THERE." And yes, he got his big laugh.

I suppose it's possible that West might have recycled some schtick he'd done before, in some other context. Any actor who makes the rounds of conventions cobbles together lots of jokes or tall tales with which to amuse listeners. But I'd like to think he was quick-witted enough to cut through the trivia-nature of the question in order to come up with something on the spot. It would go a lot toward explaining the intelligence with which West imbued the character. West's Batman could say the most cornball things, and yet, because West sold us all on the idea that Batman believed every word he said, there was a strange sense of conviction that served as a great counterpoint to all of the absurdities. And partly because of West's talent, a show that might have been pure silliness became a part of our entertainment mythology, in a way that not even good silly shows like GET SMART could ever emulate.

Since I just finished my review of the new WONDER WOMAN film this week, this week’s mythcomic will be another selection frojm the
Golden Age WONDER WOMAN mythos created by Wulliam Moulton Marston.

Though I’ve analyzed other Marston stories here and here,
both stories display a tendency seen during the first
year-and-a-half of the feature’s existence: a lack of significant villains for
the hero to battle. Prior to the 1943 story “Battle for Womanhood,” the
Amazon’s only outstanding foes were the rather tedious spy-chief Paula Von
Gunther and the evil scientist Doctor Poison, who was both the heroine’s first
costumed enemy and her first transvestite opponent. There were also an
assortment of villains from exotic cultures, outer space, and of course from
the Olympian pantheon, but these evildoers tended to lack any strong
character-traits. Nowhere is this better seen than in the otherworldly
enemy who racked up the greatest number of bouts with the Amazon: the god Mars,
who incarnated all the bad aspects of the male gender. But though Mars caused
Wonder Woman a lot of trouble, he never became anything more than an abstract
evil. However, the war-god indirectly gave rise to the heroine’s first major
foe, Doctor Psycho, and this character opened the floodgates for one of the
Golden Age’s best rogues’ galleries.

“Battle for Womanhood” commences with Mars receiving a
report from a female slave (wearing leg-irons, no less). The report concerns
the growing prominence of women lending their efforts to the Allied conflict
with the Axis powers. Mars fears that women “will achieve a horrible
independence;” further, once women are no longer considered “the spoils of
war,” they will “grow stronger than men and put an end to war.” But because Wonder
Woman has bested the war-god and his underlings in past encounters, none of
them want to face her wrath again. One of the god’s underlings, “the Duke of
Deception,” solves the problem, for he’s made contact with a mortal who hates
women as much as Mars does. So the Duke—who looks like a short, wizened man in Greek armor—descends to Earth. Emulating the gods of Homer’s Iliad, who spoke
invisibly to the Greek warriors in the field, the Duke appears at the side of
the mortal cat's-paw, whispering in the man’s ear in order to egg him on—and
that’s the last readers see of Mars or his servants in the narrative.

The cat's-paw is none other than a brilliant but embittered
scientist, Doctor Psycho. The story implies that this is his real name, not an
assumed cognomen, but it’s also probably a mild self-parody on the part of
Marston, given that he held a PhD in psychology. Psycho—a short, ugly
man with an over-sized cranium—is seen receiving an honor at a medical college. His specialty is never disclosed, though his
research involves the use of radium. Psycho’s male classmates, mostly depicted
as square-jawed swains, mock the runty fellow for his ugliness, calling him
“pumpkin head.” Even Psycho’s own fiancée, a student named Marva, doesn’t want
him to “get mushy” with her because he’s so homely, though she claims to admire
his brilliant mind. Slightly later, Psycho even sees a college athlete, Ben
Bradley, putting the moves on Marva, and it’s plain to both Psycho and the
readers that her protests are weak at best. Psycho considers letting Marva out
of her engagement, but before he has the chance, that same night someone steals
radium from Psycho’s lab. He falls under immediate suspicion, and to make
matters worse, Marva testifies that she saw Psycho leave the lab immediately
after the robbery. Marva sincerely believes Psycho
committed the crime, though the captions establish that she's simply mistaken:
that the thief she saw was merely crouched down, not actually as short as
Psycho. The scientist spends several years in prison due to Marva’s testimony,
and when Psycho receives news that his former fiancée has married Ben Bradley,
he’s convinced that the two of them framed him for the theft. As soon as Psycho
gets out of prison, he captures Bradley and forces him to confess that he was the thief. Psycho gets his revenge by forcing Bradley to swallow a chunk of
radium, knowing that it will burn holes in the man’s stomach. (Perhaps it’s an
appropriate punishment, to attack the intestines of a specimen full of
testosterone-fueled masculinity.) However, Bradley tries, without success, to
save his miserable life by claiming that Marva masterminded the frame-up.

Psycho doesn’t want to kill Marva, though. Telling her that
“death is too good for you,” the villain hypnotizes Marva, so that she agrees
to marry him, and presumably no longer discourages him from “getting mushy.”
However, Psycho’s main focus is that of using her as his own cat's-paw, to
undermine the advancement of women generally. Though Psycho has studied the
occult sciences, he apparently has no talent for channeling the ectoplasmic
powers of the spirit world. However, he can tap such energies through a female
medium. In all successive appearances of the villain when scripted by Marston,
Psycho always needs a female to make his evil magic, so it may be that Marston
was thinking of something along the lines of the legendary sorcerer Simon
Magus, whose legend includes him traveling with a female companion who
possessed mediumistic talents.

Psycho’s principal schtick is that he can, as he later
tells Wonder Woman, “materialize a body and wear it like a cloak.” Thus he
embarks upon a scheme to undermine America’s faith in its female workforce,
which is presumably the goal that Mars’ agent inspired him to seek. He makes
the public announcement that he and his medium can conjure forth the spirit of
George Washington, the country’s founding father, to counsel the nation on its
future fate. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor are both on hand when “George
Washington” appears on a stage, though it’s really just an ectoplasmic shell
inhabited by Psycho and conjured forth by Marva. (In keeping with Marston’s
affection for bondage, Marva is both bound and blindfolded during the
experiment.) “Washington” voices the fears of a patriarchal culture, claiming
that “women will betray their country through weakness,” and predicting that
feminine carelessness will bring about the destruction of a major artillery
factory. Naturally, Psycho makes this prediction come true.

Wonder Woman tries twice to expose Psycho’s tricks,
without success, and it’s hard to say what would have been her next move, if
Psycho hadn’t chosen to enact a frame-up on three female secretaries at the
same army base where Trevor works. Though the frame-up works, and the
secretaries are jailed, Trevor takes it upon himself to investigate Psycho once
more. This time Psycho, instead of playing a waiting game, decides to render
Trevor unconscious. The villain then creates an ectoplasmic double of Trevor
and uses it to summon Wonder Woman via her much-used “mental radio” device. In
short order Psycho not captures the Amazon, he splits off her astral body from
her physical form, keeping the latter in a cage and chaining the astral form to
a wall with “bands of psycho-electric magnetism.” Psycho, though he debates
killing Trevor before deciding to use him, never says what he plans to do with
Wonder Woman. Maybe he thinks death’s also too good for her as well. Or maybe he’s content to double his bondage pleasure by causing her to be literally "beside herself."

For once Wonder Woman does absolutely nothing to win free.
Psycho is only foiled because he imprisons Steve Trevor instead of simply killing him. Because of this, Trevor is able to send his own mental message to
Wonder Woman’s sidekick girl-gang, the Holliday Girls. They show up on Psycho’s
doorstep, and Psycho tries to get rid of them by assuming another disguise:
that of a handsome Latino lab assistant. Possibly Psycho’s own buried desire
for female regard betrays him in this, for his handsome disguise causes the
girls to start pestering him for dates. (Indeed, it’s not entirely clear as to
whether they still remember the mission they’re on.) Because the villain
becomes distracted, he loses mental control of the devices imprisoning the
heroine, who rejoins her body and then frees both Trevor and Marva. Psycho is
captured, and Wonder Woman addresses Marva’s general wimpiness with an
empowering homily: “the better you can fight, the less you’ll have to.”

Marston was apparently intrigued enough with his new
villain that, in addition to giving him the first of the three stories in
WONDER WOMAN #5, the evildoer also appears in the third tale, retroactively
titled “Return of Dr. Psycho.” It’s a much simpler story, in which Psycho uses
an ectoplasmic double to escape his execution in prison and to fake his death.
The only interesting aspect of “Return” is the fact that the villain once again
needs a woman to create his psychic shells, though he’s forced to choose
someone other than Marva to achieve this task. This is nearly tantamount to
saying that only the gender that possesses a womb can also create things in the
psychic realm, which seems like a rather strange dictum for a male author to propound.

Dozens of academic papers have been written on the notion
that “narratives of masculinity” in fiction always have conceptual holes in
them that allegedly prove the impossibility of the whole narrative. By this
logic, it ought to be possible to find just as many holes in “narratives of
femininity,” if one wished to play such a one-upping game. I don’t doubt for a
moment that Marston means it seriously when he foresees women becoming a
beneficial force on society through legal and cultural emancipation. However, I
find it significant that in this story about a man seeking revenge on the
female sex because of perceived wrongs, the main heroine lacks her usual
competence, and even the females who come to her aid only are brought in at the
last minute, by the agency of another man. Moreover, while a lot of Marston’s
female victims are sympathetic despite being one-dimensional characters, Marva
is both one-dimensional and unsympathetic. Marston says nothing about her
motives for remaining engaged to a man she doesn’t love, but I speculate that
the motives could have gone beyond mere admiration for his mind, into the realm
of the fortune hunter. Surely Marston was familiar in his time with women who
went to college not for their betterment, but to marry men who might earn big
bank accounts in future. Even putting that aside as sheer speculation, Marva
also seems rather stupid in her conviction that Psycho committed the radium
theft, given that she didn’t even see his face. Since she does marry
Psycho’s rival later, one might argue that on some buried PSYCHO-logical level,
she wanted to get rid of an unattractive fiancée, even if her conscious mind
wanted to marry for money. By creating a male villain who sins only because
he’s been “sinned against” by a woman, Marston pokes a sizable hole in his own anti-male rhetoric, and draws a picture of feminine fallibility that no
empowering slogans can efface.

Thursday, June 15, 2017

I reviewed both the 1987 STEPFATHER and the 1993 PRAYING MANTIS in the same month in 2017, but it only recently occurred to me that the later film exemplifies what I said at the end of the first review:

While there's no question in my mind that Jerry is a "perilous psycho" in the uncanny mode, I had to think whether or not STEPFATHER also made use of the uncanny version of the "bizarre crime." Certainly Jerry's not an artful psycho: he clubs one victim to death with a board. But I finally decided that his motif of moving from family to family in pursuit of his twisted ideal qualified as a bizarre crime in itself-- though of course, like any uncanny facet of a narrative, it can be reconfigured to take on a purely naturalistic phenomenality, as one indeed sees in some of STEPFATHER's imitators.

I don't think that PRAYING MANTIS was an intentional copy of STEPFATHER, foi the later movie just doesn't seem to "quote" the earlier one the way a true knock-off emulates its original. It's interesting, though, that the movie to which MANTIS has been most often compared (on IMDB) is also from the year 1987: the Theresa Russell vehicle BLACK WIDOW. In any case, here are the similarities and differences:

(1) Both narratives deal with a psycho who repeatedly moves from family to family, killing as he or she goes. However, Jerry Blake kills all the members of the family into which he marries, while Linda Crandell kills only the man whom she marries.

(2) In both films, the cops assigned to the case assert that the unknown killer must have a major trauma in his or her background. In both films, the trauma is never revealed to the audience.

(3) Both psychos are artless killers who display no more particular creativity in their methods of murder. Blake uses blunt objects or edged weapons, while Crandell uses poison.

(4) In both films, young members of the family into which the psycho marries are largely responsible for exposing each evildoer, though the initial person to suspect Crandell is the sister-in-law of the first wife of Crandell's intended victim.

(5) In my critical opinion, neither film does much of anything with the psychological potential of their scenarios.

Given that I've stated that there's no single element about the uncanny film that couldn't have appeared in a naturalistic film, it behooves me to ask then: what makes Jerry Blake an uncanny psycho, while Crandell's only naturalistic? I've alluded to at least part of the answer in saying that the "twisted ideal" Blake pursues gives his "bizarre crime" the tonality of the uncanny. In contrast, Crandell really doesn't have an ideal as such: she's merely compensating for her past trauma by trying to find someone who won't betray her, possibly in the form of a father-substitute. This would also accord with what I've written about the nature of all naturalistic fictions: that they must always seem to be "logical extrapolations from [the author's] observations of experience."

Since the physical phenomena in STEPFATHER and in MANTIS are essentially identical, the only thing that can possibly separate them is that the former is far more invested in the tropes of story-telling-- that is, in the principle of artifice-- as opposed to that of experience, a.k.a. verisimilitude.

"Affective freedom," rather, stems from the author's intention to privilege the tropes from the domain of literary artifice over tropes that signify adherence to worldly verisimilitude...-- ARCHETYPE AND ARTIFICE PT. 4.

But once again, I stress that I can only make such a judgment by imaging a *threshold* that separates the limitations of "affective freedom" in a naturalistic work from its more intense expression in an uncanny one. It's a subjective judgment that STEPFATHER just barely manages to step over that threshold, despite all of its similarities to PRAYING MANTIS; that STEPFATHER is more a figure of uncanny artifice akin to the much more outrageous-looking Jason Voorhees (in his early incarnation, that is). But I still favor this approach over a "recipe" mentality, in which, say, the presence of any psycho of any kind automatically crossed into the greater category of the metaphenomenal.

Friday, June 9, 2017

I'm returning to the topic of this brief "series," last seen in 2014, because one of the films I've just reviewed speaks so well to the "two forms of will" elaborated there:

I should have said earlier that these two forms of will, these "two souls" that seem to dwell in every human's breast, only appear in fictional characters to the extent that their creators choose to emphasize one or both. It is possible to have characters who are purely devoted to glorious ideals, or purely devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence. It is also possible to have combinations of the two, but one form of will must dominate over the other...

In my review of the 1971 Hammer film TWINS OF EVIL, I remarked that although it was part of a trilogy of vampire films based on Sheridan LeFanu's novel CARMILLA, TWINS did not center on the menace of the vampires, in contrast to most films containing vampires. Rather, the "star" of the story, played by the top-billed Peter Cushing, is a (17th-century?) witch-hunter named Gustav Weil.

(I should note that top billing in itself doesn't equate with the star of the story. The most extreme example of this is that Bela Lugosi gets star-billing in the serial THE WHISPERING SHADOW, but he plays neither villain nor hero, but simply a red herring-type.)

Weil is apposite to the matter of fictional characters whose creators have given them combinations of both the idealizing will, with its "glorious ideals," and the existential will, "devoted to the persistence of ordinary existence." As the film begins, the viewer sees Weil and his cohorts burning a young woman to death on the suspicion that she's a witch. This act makes it impossible for most viewers to assign him the status of the hero, so by my system he could still be one of three other personas: villain, monster, or demihero. Villains are suggest a devotion to the pure ideal of contravening good, but it's soon apparent that Weil thinks that his witch-hunting serves the purpose of his version of Christianity and of his community. It would be possible for a witch-hunter to be a monster who, in the name of pure survival, has become estranged from his community due to his obsessions: this formula appears in another Peter Cushing role, his "Baron Frankenstein" as portrayed in CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Yet Weil seems to blend in with his community, even though not all the locals approve of his witch-finding activities. Thus at first, Weil seems closest in tone to the negative form of the demihero: the type who I observed in this essay to be "a loathsome viewpoint character who deserves to be destroyed."

Yet, as the movie's plot unfolds, Weil's dedication to his cause is shown to be sincere even if he makes poor choices regarding the objects of his persecution. Further, vampires in Weil's world are real, and thus he's not totally unjustified in crusading against evil. But the new information still doesn't elevate Weil to the level of a heroic figure like the Van Helsing of Hammer's DRACULA series. It's not just that he's fallible, but he's fallible in a way that shows the negative consequences of the existential will. Thus, at the climax Anton, the "hero" (but not "star") of the story finally makes Weil aware of his failures, Weil still does not take on the stature of the hero, even when he leads his followers in an assault upon the castle of the vampire. Weil has some idealizing will in him, but it's been trumped by the existential will, the part of him that has been content to attack impotent victims rather than assail the true source of evil. I observed a similar admixture of "the two souls" in Cushing's Baron Frankenstein as well, as I chronicled here, but in the Baron's case he is estranged enough from the community to be deemed a "monster."

On a side-note, TWINS seems to be a rare example of a horror-film oriented on the demihero rather than the monster; to date I've analyzed only one other such film here. But in that film, the monster dies and the demihero survives, while in TWINS OF EVIL, it's the demihero and the monster who are the real "twins," in being diametrically opposed evils that are both destroyed by film's end.

Thursday, June 8, 2017

For all that the Surfer is not integral to the conflict's resolution, he combines some fascinating Judeo-Christian motifs. It's hard to say whether or not either Lee or Kirby drew any conscious parallels between the Surfer and the Christian Son of God, not least because the latter does not rebel against his heavenly father. Rebellion is more the department of Satan/Lucifer, who is generally characterized as being opposed to the good fortune of humanity. Nevertheless, I think it possible that Lee and Kirby's collaboration brought a fortuitous confluence of ideas, possibly one that neither creator could have pulled off alone. In the Surfer's later appearances, the character became more visibly an Imitatio Christi, though Kirby still tended to emphasize his inability to comprehend human mores.

The Silver Surfer made a few appearances in the FANTASTIC FOUR title before the character finally received his first solo appearance in a short tale in FANTASTIC FOUR ANNUAL #5, about a year and a half after his first appearance. I have the sense that though both creators hoped to find some way to spin off the hero into his own series, they might not have quite known what direction to pursue. Yet this story-- the only solo-starring role for the Lee-Kirby Surfer, before Lee decided to launch a Surfer series in 1968 with John Buscema-- does touch on some of the same themes that Lee would explore without Kirby. For instance, many Kirby stories begin with a little gratuitous action, and this one is no exception: the Surfer is just flying around on his board when some duck-hunters fire at him.

After the Surfer sends the hunters running for cover, he moralizes on the unique penchant of human beings to hunt other creatures for sport. I recall that in the day this prompted a letter from a fan who's seen a Lee-Kirby tale in which the alien Skrulls were seen in hunting-activities, but even without this continuity-cop input, it does sound pretty unlikely that the Surfer has never seen any other sentient beings hunting for sport.

More successful on the next page is a moment where the Surfer, far from being a stranger to human emotions, now seems attuned to the massed emotions of humankind. I view this as the real beginning of the Surfer's "Christ complex," in which he takes on the appearance of a secular savior toward humankind. Prior to this story, the Surfer tended to keep his distance from the sufferings of humans, like a distant deity. But where Galactus took the role of a "destroying angel" in the Galactus trilogy, here the Surfer becomes a de facto "creator-god."

The sky-rider's sensitivity to emotions leads him into the company of Quasimodo, a sentient computer created by the Mad Thinker, last seen in FF ANNUAL #4. The Surfer feels pity for the mechanical being, and liberates him from bondage.

However, Quasimodo isn't immediately impressed with the form he receives. Kirby, a long-time fan of the 1923 HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME film, clearly modeled the living computer on the tragic freak from the movie. But that Quasimodo, despite his crude upbringing, tried to show some kindness to the gypsy girl Esmerelda. This Quasimodo not only fails to thank the Surfer for the alien's act of largesse, he immediately starts bitching about how his "creator" didn't give him a better looking mug. Lee or Kirby may have also had in mind something like the attitude of Mary Shelley's Monster, when he quotes Milton about not getting a good break in the looks department:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clayTo mould me Man, did I solicit theeFrom darkness to promote me?

Of course, Quasimodo is also the creation of a super-villain, so maybe the apple simply doesn't fall far from the tree. The villain blasts the Surfer, apparently killing the alien. Then Quasimodo goes on a rampage, tearing up New York (at least one King Kong visual quote appears here), until the Surfer shows up. Following a seesaw battle, the Surfer takes back his gift of life, and returns Quasimodo to stationary status-- though of course later stories resurrected the villain for further use.

It should be noted that there's a strong psychological motif here regarding physical appearance. Quasimodo is so sensitive about his looks-- even though he's only been ambulatory for a few minutes-- that during the battle he thinks the New York citizens are worried about the Surfer because "he is handsome, and I am ugly!" It's long been a commonplace trope in comics to pit ugly villains against handsome heroes, and even though the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR mitigates that trope somewhat with heroes like the Thing, clearly Kirby didn't mind playing up to the audience's tendency to equate ethical superiority with physical attractiveness. It's possible that on some level the rejection of the "ugly villain" also represented for Kirby-- and possibly for Lee-- the rejection of what are usually called "baser instincts," such as cruelty and envy. This would accord with the tendency of Lee and Kirby in their Surfer-collaborations to see the "handsome" Surfer as the embodiment of the "higher instincts," even though, truth to tell, a number of the Lee-Buscema stories portray the hero as being somewhat corrupted by his interactions with human culture.But that's another story.

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

I admit I didn't know "sealioning," which sounded like it came from the same mindset that gave us "mansplaining," and sure enough, it is:

the name given to a specific, pervasive form of aggressive cluelessness, that masquerades as a sincere desire to understand

At least you should get your own jargon right. You're free to think me clueless, as I am to think the same of you, but there's nothing I've written here than connotes false sincerity. Arrogance, yes, impatience with narrow politicized thinking,yes. But the closest thing to false sincerity appears in your inability to admit that you made a bad comparison between Plummer's non-fictional essay and a completely unrelated fictional comic by Sophie Labelle. And once your mistake was pointed out, you assumed a pose of sincere disdain for anyone who chose not to acknowledge your supposed wit-- thus, "making it all about you."

By the way, can anyone explain to me why advocates of queer theory (as Plummer must be, since he's queering Dick Grayson) are so in love with Frederic Wertham? Isn't this the guy who was warning American parents about how their children were going to be corrupted by those evil comic books, which presented salacious images of smooth rich men luring young men into decadent ways? There's a word for people like Freddy Wertham, and it does have the word "queer" IN it, but it isn't "queer theorist." (HInt: the last part rhymes with, "tater.")

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Yeah, once again I tossed out a quick, snide jibe at an essay to which THE BEAT linked here: an essay in which the author claimed that Robin was a "queering influence" upon the Batman mythos. After my jibe, one reader differed with my opinion. I imagine that Heidi probably wanted to say to him-- well, what I say in the title. I responded, in keeping with my general distinction between the natures of fiction and non-fiction, I wrote:

Fictional comics about "toxic masculinity" can be directed at specific audiences because fiction does not (or should not) have to meet tests as to real-world applicability.

Non-fictional articles may indeed be written to target audiences, but in theory they ought to meet the test as to real-world applicability.

Now, from the little bit I had read of the essay, it had nothing directly to do with the contrasts of fiction and non-fiction. But now I've obligated myself to critique this newest (yawn) queeritude quitique of Robin the Boy Wonder. Here, lemme read it while I do my daily Sudoku...

Author Jess Plummer foregrounds his thoughts on Dick Grayson's oppositional status by focusing on a forthcoming, out-of-continuity miniseries in which Nightwing Will Kill the DC Universe, more or less. Plummer correctly tags this as a likely borrowing of the current "Hydra Captain America" schtick, but then decides that the choice of Dick Grayson signifies that "Dick Grayson makes straight men nervous." This is because, from the conception of the original Robin, the youth has functioned as "a damsel in distress" to his mentor Batman.

Frederic Wertham is then credited with having "picked up on" this startling truth, and with having popularized the "queering influence" of Robin on the Batman mythos. (Plummer cleverly inserts a comic-strip excerpt in which Robin is forced to dress in a frilly Louis XIV-looking gown, as if this sort of thing happened all the time in Batman comics.) Plummer then informs us that Queer Robin so informed the Bat-serials that the only reason DC Comics introduced new female characters was to deflect readers from suspecting the awful truth, that Dick Grayson was just Jaye Davidson in drag.

Plummer then quickly vaults over the romantic history of the Robin character to focus upon his NEW TEEN TITANS alliance with "his taller, stronger, much more aggressive girlfriend Starfire." There follows a Werthamesque meditation on Nightwing's "non-gendered name." We hear nothing about the intermittent romance with Barbara Gordon--

-- but Plummer is quick to vault ahead a few more years to the (out-of-continuity) DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, whose main significance is to portray a dead Robin. We are told that this is yet another assault on the Robin persona, even though Dick Grayson is alive but off-panel while Jason Todd is the one who died.

Another pole-vault, and we're in 2004, talking about the death of Stephanie Brown (not killed directly by Black Mask's power drill as I recall), and the return of Jason Todd as an amoral "hero" (which, even though he's come BACK to life, is I guess still being raked over the coals after a fashion). Then we finally get down to Plummer's theme statement: Robin is being continually killed and tortured because straight readers and/or creators see him as That Ole Debbil, the Queering Influence.

Oddly enough, this bit of "straightbaiting"-- in which straights are automatically assumed to be out to degrade and mortify anyone who may upset their sexual applecart-- borrows the exact same non-logical rhetoric as "queerbaiting." While there may well be many comic-book readers who do not like Robin, it's intellectually irresponsible to interpret those anti-Robin sentiments as part of some subconscious jeremiad against Robin's "queering influence."

Finally, I'll close by noting that Plummer doesn't appear to be very good about reading current stuff either. since he makes the statement.

You’ll never see Batman sexually assaulted while disassociating.

Oh, REALLY--

Not to mention the fact that, although Morrison did rewrite the events of the Barr-Bingham "Son of the Demon" graphic novel, he specifically has Batman task Talia with having drugged him at the conclusion of BATMAN INC.

Yes, just another day at the "How Dare They Marginalize Me and Then Not Admit It" corral.

Monday, June 5, 2017

SYNTAX: --the way in which linguistic elements (such as words) are put together to form constituents (such as phrases or clauses)--Merriam Webster online.

After not having read THE HURTING for a couple years since I tried to engage blogger Tim O'Neil on the subject of Stan Lee, I happened across his newest post, TRUE BELIEVERS, part of a longer series of essays that I've not read. The substance of BELIEVERS is O'Neil's sussing out of his particular attachment to Marvel Comics and its characters. It's a refreshing piece in that, even though the author expresses more than a little disenchantment with current comics, he doesn't put forth some Grothian notion that comic books were a juvenile phase he should have grown out of, or that his life was hugely improved once he sold his soul to art-comics, or some such. For the most part, O'Neil attempts not to draw any morals:

Do you know why we care? I go back and forth – I’m not sure why I feel the way I do. There’s no conclusion here. Don’t look for a revelation, unless it’s your own. Certainty is comforting. It’s familiar. I don’t want to speak unless I know exactly what I’m about to say, and I don’t want to express an opinion unless that opinion is completely solid. It’s a lot harder to say, “I don’t know.”

I don’t know why comics hooked me. All I know is that they did. All I can do is try to tell you what I feel and think. Maybe you can provide your own answers.

I still found some grounds for disagreement, though, in the definition of one's attachment to a given mode of entertainment purely in terms of nostalgia, an attempt to re-connect with pleasurable aspects of one's upbringing:

There’s an old saying, credited to a man named Peter Graham, that the Golden Age of sci-fi is twelve. Knock a few years off and the same goes for comics: the comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics. Nothing will ever come close in your eyes to that first rush, from back before you knew enough about the making of the books to become cynical. Even if the comics you grew up with were awful (and they most likely were), they will always be the pure and uncut high for which you will hunger for the rest of your life.

This needs some modifications. First, I think it should be "the GOOD comics you read as a kid will always be the best comics." I can't speak for O'Neil, but my earliest memories of reading comics as a kid were informed by the sure and certain knowledge that some comics were memorable only because they were so bad. My memories are hazy of my earliest encounters with comic strips and kids' comic books, but I have a few recollections of displeasure. The earliest one I can conjure up had to do with my general disappointment that Gold Key's adaptation of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters not only failed to reproduce the hilarious anarchy of the animated shorts, but they also delivered far less entertainment than even middle-level funny-animals like WOODY WOODPECKER and TOM AND JERRY, much less the greatness of the Disney books.

Second, without endorsing Gary Groth's views on maturation, one does form different likes over the years. The child-reader who was grossed out by the DICK TRACY comic strip of the early 1960s became more tolerant of bloodshed by the 1970s, enough to appreciate at least mildly gory titles like Marvel's 1971 WEREWOLF BY NIGHT. So one's nostalgia isn't exactly the fixed point in time O'Neil describes. It's more of a continuum, formed by the fact that childhood becomes adolescence and one's priorities change, even if (arguably) one's basic tastes do not.

Third, I do have some problems with the idea that one only approaches entertainment in a spirit of weakness or disempowerment, though I don't rule those out entirely. O'Neil happily doesn't dwell on this too long:

I needed something. I needed something to hold onto when so much about the world didn’t make sense. I didn’t exclusively gravitate towards particular characters, although I obviously have my favorites just like everyone else. The characters themselves, I have always maintained, are relatively unimportant: what matters is the whole. What matters is that it hangs together into something resembling a cohesive aggregate entity, one story being told over decades by hundreds of people.

But because his focus is exclusively personal, I think O'Neil misses seeing a pattern applicable to fans of all forms of entertainment: the reader's desire for coherence, to suss out many different views or takes on life and to decide what applies to said reader. One doesn't need the medium of an interconnected universe for this.

The word "syntax" is usually applied only to the way that words are used to form sentences, but it applies no less to the ways in which the ideas behind the words cohere. This is something every person "needs" whether the world makes sense to them or not. People, whether they write stories or not, build up meaning through syntactical constructions, and an understanding of how this occurs becomes part of the Social Contract. I can't substantially disagree with Gary Groth if I don't understand how his conclusions proceed from his premises. So I think nostalgia for past pleasures, at least with respect to entertainment, stems from gaining a sense of empowerment as we master different levels of syntactical awareness.

In conclusion, O'Neil's essay again takes a shot or two at Stan Lee, but since I've already disagreed with his premises here, there's no need to repeat myself on this score. However, the reason I've continually referred to "modes of entertainment" is because I don't think anything O'Neil writes about comics applies only to comics:

Comics started off a shady business built to entice children into spending their money. They are still a shady business built to entice children into spending their money, but inflation and retail conditions meant their audience grew older without ever growing up. Just like me.

There may be individual artists who will starve in garrets for their individual visions, or will keep their works to themselves without any intent of publishing them. But none of these eccentrics ever created an art-form. Theater, literature, music and the visual arts become regularized activities when individuals in a society realize that they can specialize in singing or play-acting, and from this stems the role of "the professional," who must be paid for his or her services, so that he can continue delivering his art to society instead of stopping to plant corn or whatever. And none of these forms would gain traction if they did not offer the audience a way to see life through as many viewpoints as possible-- all of which adds up to a "syntax of experience."

Friday, June 2, 2017

Any one who's read this blog for any length of time will have noticed that I've often complained about having some of my cyber-remarks deleted or censored. By some divine irony, it's almost always been by persons who take the political position of liberals, which may say something about the intellectual wherewithall of current liberals, at least in the comics community. This last week, however, brought in a bumper crop of three, though I was only tangentially involved in one of them.

The tangential one appeared on this BEAT post. The substance of the original post was to record how some conservative pushback had appeared against using comic books in schoolrooms due to a perceived "liberal agenda." Most of the posters assumed a fairly liberal stance in response to the topic, but one fellow, whose longlong name I'll abbreviate to "Eor," made two posts of a more or less conservative tone. The second post contained two very short remarks, arguing (as I recall) that the liberal notion of "sexuality is a social construct" was no more objective than many conservative notions. I agree with the latter topic, and just wrote, "Good one." Then Heidi deleted the second post and it looked like I was agreeing with Eor's sole remaining post.

I also decided to test the depth of the intellectual waters at the Superhero Hype Board by reprinting THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES there, sans the title. I flatter myself that it should be clear that it was not an overarching defense of the Southern cause-- yet the dozen or so responses to the thread were concerned only with condemning the Confederacy as the Ultimate Evil. On top of that, someone asked for the thread to be closed, and so it was. So much for enlightened debate there.

Much less surprising was the deletion of two posts on a "pro-LGBT" thread on CBR Community. While I had never posted on said thread before, I'd been something of a gadfly against the knee-jerk ultraliberals for some time, so I imagine that some moderator was simply over-reacting against an innocuous post. On the LGBT thread, someone used the phrase "straight privilege" as if it were a self-evident thing. My two posts requested a definition or citation of what the poster thought it meant. No one responded, except the moderator, who after deleting my posts penned a self-righteous screed in which he thought it was dumb for anyone to question the existence of straight privilege. I didn't say it didn't exist, and I wasn't necessarily planning to debate anyone on the subject, but the moderator just didn't want to deal with heavy matters like definition of terms.

So I guess I'll be looking for new forums in future for debate potential. I suspect the ones with "comics" in the title have all been played out.

In AN ARCHETYPAL LIBRARY I gave pride of place to the first
two issues of Steve Englehart’s Epic-published COYOTE series. At the time I wrote that, I hadn’t given the rest of the Coyote-tales a close reading: either
the seven installments that appeared in ECLIPSE MONTHLY magazine or the
remaining fifteen in the Epic series. I only remembered that after the first
two solo-feature issues, in which Englehart’s script was beautifully realized
by artist Steve Leialoha, both story and artwork fell off drastically in
quality. Yet, given that I’ve said it’s possible to have a significant symbolic
discourse even when other qualities are lacking, I decided to re-examine the
full Coyote series.

I found no reason to change my opinion of the ECLIPSE
MONTHLY stories, which I touched on briefly in a review for COMICS JOURNAL #85
(1983). This sequence introduced Coyote, a hero named for the Native American trickster-god. He possessed shape-shifting
and dimension-crossing powers, the heritage of a meandering and confusing backstory. With almost no motivation, the hero began clashing with his principal
adversaries: a secret organization called the Shadow Cabinet. These assorted spy-jinks led me to label the Eclipse series as “American Werewolf gets a shave
and plays James Bond.” I also noted that
collaborator Marshall Rogers was guilty of “cardboard figures and meticulously
cluttered panels.” At best the Eclipse stories rate as near myths.

The sixteen Epic issues, however, do manage to realize a
“density of discourse” that raises them to the level of “good myths.” Englehart had established in the earlier stories that Coyote got his supernatural
powers as the result of being raised in a society of eldritch beings: a
were-coyote foster-father and a vampire foster-mother. But in the Epic series,
Englehart deepened the protagonist’s connection to Native American lore and
culture. Though Coyote’s “origin-story” is laid out without a lot of attention
to motives or consistency, it does establish that Coyote, a mortal man, was
actually chosen by the Native American coyote-god to help drive out the
Europeans who conquered the lands of the red men. This revised origin didn’t
come to much in terms of plot, but it allowed Englehart to intermingle two
forms of narrative: the modern-day, superspy-like adventures of his hero, and vignettes about the original coyote-god’s adventures in the world that existed before the Caucasian invasion. I don’t know to what extent Englehart’s vignettes derived from
real Native American folklore, although some of the details are certainly
provided by the writer himself. The significance of the vignettes is that
Englehart emulates much of the earthy humor that characterizes
authentic Amerindian folktales. One outstanding vignette, possibly the height
of the Englehart-Leialoha collaboration, deals with Coyote’s creation of the
Milky Way by his impulsiveness.

And what of the main story concerning the hero? Well, in
1983 I wrote that he was one of several contemporary heroes who were more
concerned with “maintaining personal freedom” rather than expousing total
altruism (I was big on the theme of altruism vs. selfhood back in the
1980s.) Coyote, having much of the nature of his trickster-god, is full of
youthful self-confidence, contempt for those of lesser attainments, and just
plain horniness. Indeed, whereas James Bond of the Movies often got to bone at
least two women per film—albeit separately—Coyote is a true “harem fantasy,” in
which he hooks up with two sisters (one white, one phenotypically black) and later with a third hottie, a female Russian assassin. Issue #16 concludes not only
with Coyote’s victory over the Shadow Cabinet, but also his success with
getting at least two of the hotties to remain in his personal seraglio. I’m not
sure if any modern American comics-creator would even be able to pitch, much
less have published, such a politically incorrect male fantasy.

Further, Englehart does manage to tie together Coyote’s
current enemies with the mythic past of the folklore-Coyote, for the Shadow
Cabinet is largely run by magical beings called:”Crows.” Native American
folklore has its share of crow-gods, but it’s not clear if these are gods,
though in one of the past vignettes the Crows are seen as the persistent
adversaries of the coyote-god. At the very least, the presence of the Crows
keeps the Shadow Cabinet from being just another globe-spanning secret
organization.

Ironically, in 1983, I wrote just the opposite, stating
that I thought the Cabinet was meant to be more than “SPECTRE or Hydra;” that
it was a metaphor for Englehart’s view of the “grasping-and-taking aspect of
American business.” I no longer think Englehart applied this metaphor to the
Cabinet itself: now I think it really was just another SPECTRE, albeit with
overcomplicated origins (including aliens!) Yet throughout the sixteen Epic
issues, Englehart adroitly contrasts the anal-retentive tendencies of Anglo
culture with the more freewheeling spontaneity of Amerindian ways. He also
works in interesting commentaries on the three “Religions of the Book”—Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam—all of whom appear as minor players in the pagan
conflict of Coyote and the Crows.

On a side-note, Marvel’s publication of the Coyote series
also gave Englehart a venue inn which to publish his four-part collaboration
with Steve Ditko, “The Djinn.” Only one installment of the series had seen
previous publication, but Marvel published the whole series, much to the
delectation of Ditko enthusiasts, since the series featured some of the
artist’s best eighties work. Englehart also worked the continuity of the “Djinn”
story into Coyote’s mythos reasonably well, but over time the writer created
too many wild subplots, so that the series came off as belonging to the
“everything plus the kitchen sink” school.

Issue sixteen concludes with the words, “James Bond is
problematical, but—Coyote will return!” it takes a special kind of nerve to
claim that your comic-book character has a better chance to return than that
internationally famous superspy 007. But in this Englehart proved a better
writer than a prophet, for Coyote hasn’t turned any new tricks in the comics since
1986.